Romney may be as perfectly manufactured a fake as ever has been handed to the American public, but Perry is as lead-footed on his feet as any major candidate we've ever seen.

I was just thinking yesterday that it might be too early to count out Rick Perry. He's still the governor of a substantial state. He can still raise more than a little money. He doesn't have two heads. He's plainly the more popular of the two Republican Ricks. (Of all the Republican dicks, of course, he's still pretty far up the track. That cheap joke is brought to you by the David Broder Memorial Fund. Thank you.) And, of course, unless those dopes in New Hampshire move their primary up to 11 minutes from now, which they still might do, there are still three months before anyone casts a vote that counts. If, as the current surge of Hermania is said to indicate, the Republican field is "volatile" — which, in this case, is a synonym for "crackpots voting for" — why isn't there room for Rick Perry to come back? Especially since, I can assure you, there are a lot more of these where this one came from....

I watched Mitt Romney run for the Senate in Massachusetts. I watched him run for governor. Hell, I watched him be governor. The only reason he can run this rap about his not being a "career politician" is that Ted Kennedy beat him. Well, that and the fact that the man is a soulless corporate drone who'd sell you, me, and our gray-haired grannies to the Somali pirates for another two-percent off the top rate and a four-point bump in the Gallup polls.

The Republican Party is simply never going to be happy with Mitt Romney. Granted, this is partly because a substantial part of the Republican Party is insane. Granted, this is because another substantial part of the Republican party is only marginally insane. But mostly, this is because a substantial part of the Republican party realizes, as does any sentient human being, that Mitt Romney is the Piltdown Man of American politics, a massive public hoax cleverly built from the dead bones of other campaigns. He's as perfectly manufactured a fake as ever has been handed to the American public.

He got rich throwing people out of work, which even the Tea Party people are bright enough to realize has the occasional adverse social consequence. He belongs to a funky religion of which Jesus is said to disapprove, even though Mormonism is the only religion in which Jesus gets a vacation in the South Seas, which, I suspect, He would have enjoyed a great deal. He was governor of the capital of Health Care Reform and Gay Marriage. So, the crazy people have dozens of reasons to despise him, not all of which I find completely unreasonable. The money people are comfortable with him — the one authentic thing about Romney is that he's one of them — but the money people are also worried that the inchoate rage swirling about in the zeitgeist these days might yet come to rest on them, thereby splitting Republican money from Republican fervor. In that scenario, as in almost all the others, Mitt Romney likely would feel strongly both ways.

So why not Rick Perry? Again.

Leaving aside the sotto voce speculation about his health — which was barely sotto in New Hampshire after he hit the middle of the last debate looking like Alexis Arguello in the last round against Aaron Pryor — the biggest problem with Rick Perry is a perfect fractal of the biggest problem with the Perry campaign. He is as lead-footed on his feet as any major candidate I've ever seen. He doesn't have what the football coaches call "lateral quickness." He thinks on his feet with the dexterity of an andiron. He adapts to an unfamiliar question like a duck confronting the space shuttle. He corners like an oil tanker. Watch him when he tries to deliver a zinger. He looks like a guy learning to dance by following the footprints painted on the floor of the studio. Move one of the footprints a quarter-of-an-inch, and he'll dance himself out the window and down three floors to the sidewalk.

And his campaign has the same problem, squared. It was not prepared to handle the sudden rush of success in the wake of Perry's announcement, which did so much to deflate the bubble that was Michele Bachmann, now D.B.A. the Herman Cain of August. It was not prepared when things started to unravel shortly thereafter. And it has been utterly incompetent now that things have unraveled as badly as they have. But none of these problems is insurmountable. In that NBC/Wall Street Journalpoll that touched off the spasm of Hermania today, you will also find that Perry's favorability among people describing themselves as "very conservative" remains substantial. There is a sense, fragile as it may be, that a lot of people in the party are still looking for a reason to support Rick Perry. Against all the obvious odds, his campaign still has... potential.

This has begun to occur to other people as well. And then I confront something like this, and I draw some gloomy conclusions. I determine that Perry's staffers are plainly deficient in their lateral movement because, if a reporter asks a candidate who used to be a male yell-leader — and let's not even get into why that little biographical tidbit wasn't locked in a lead box and sent to the bottom of the Rio Grande before the campaign even began — what his cheer for himself would be, it is the staffer's job to leap up and stuff a sock in the candidate's mouth. The candidate himself is supposed to be sharp enough to duck that question, but, if you've been with Rick Perry for longer than eleven seconds, you know that the man ducks questions as well as a cow ducks the bolt-pistol in a slaughterhouse. Hence, it's your job to keep him from stepping on his own Rick Perry like this. I recall the (possibly fictional) Muskie staff memo from 1972 that Hunter Thompson published that said, "Under no circumstances should the candidate be allowed to speak for himself," and I think that nobody yet has had the gumption to send that memo to Rick Pery.